Why the New Mac Mini is Apple's Most Insane Deal Yet

Introduction

So usually, one crazy thing about a new piece of tech is enough to get my attention—just something out of the ordinary about it. But this new Mac mini has three things about it that are insane. Instead of having an event this year, Apple decided to do a bunch of press releases in a row for the last week of October to update their whole Mac lineup to M4.

The Tiny Size

And one of them was for this new Mac mini. Now, a lot of us might not give too much thought to the Mac mini. Yeah, maybe it holds an important place as the most affordable Mac, but if you're not buying one, you're not really thinking about it too much. But the number one most insane thing about this refresh is, well, I mean, look at it—it's tiny.

It is absolutely tiny. Apple's gone through and redesigned basically all of their computers now that have gotten the Mac silicon update, except for this one. This is the same design as before, but the Mac mini was kind of overdue for a redesign. The new one actually looks a little more like a shrunken Mac Studio than a shrunken old Mac mini.

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It's now a 5-inch by 5-inch footprint and 2 inches tall. I'll say that again: a 5 by 5 by 2 desktop computer. Now, I like small desktops, and yes, you could get a tiny desktop computer before. There's plenty of amazing mini ITX build videos all over the internet that I've watched for years.

They're sick. But there's levels to this. There are small computers, and then there are tiny computers. This Mac mini is smaller than my R5 with a lens on it. It's smaller than a new roll of duct tape. It's smaller than the footprint of the new iPhone and barely bigger than the absolutely tiny Apple TV.

Apple's seemingly had this obsession with making certain computers as small as possible, even before Apple Silicon came along. So this has just unlocked another level for them to push it even further than ever before. Yeah, there are fans in here, but there are also ports on the back: gigabit ethernet by default, full-size HDMI is still here, and three Thunderbolt ports on the back, plus two USB-C 3 ports on the front and the headphone jack.

So, still no SD card reader, and there's obviously no more USB-A. If you tried to build or buy another computer to match this thing, you'd either end up building a computer that's just as small but nowhere near as capable, or a computer that's just as capable but nowhere near as small.

It is just a hilariously unnecessarily tiny computer. It's great.

The Power Button Conspiracy

I would also like to start a new conspiracy theory. I think there's someone whose job it is at Apple, whose sole purpose is to come up with one obnoxious thing to complain about for every new Apple product redesign.

Like, this is the person that put the notch on the iPhone. This is the person that put the charge port at the bottom of the Magic Mouse. And this person's best work is right here on this new Mac mini: putting the power button on the bottom of it. Like, why? There are so many better places to put a power button, like at the front or the side, or literally anywhere on the back, like all the other small Mac desktops.

Or at the top. That would've been fine too. But no, they chose behind the back corner, which is (sighs) just... I mean, I don't use that button very often. I don't really turn the Mac on and off with a button almost ever. I might sleep it and wake it back up, and maybe every couple of weeks, I'll have to remember that the button's back there.

Thermals, Battery, and Speakers

But yeah, you know, the typical consequences of a computer getting smaller are battery, speakers, and thermals. There's just less room inside for those things. Battery, of course, doesn't make a huge difference on a desktop—who cares? Speakers, kind of the same thing—who cares? And thermals have been redesigned in a way that seem to be working just fine.

This thing hardly makes a peep. If you do heavy tasks, the single fan spins up and you can hear it, but it's always been quiet, sitting on the desk. You can hardly hear it.

The Incredible Deal

So then, the number two insane thing about the new Mac mini is that the base model is kind of an incredible deal now. No, like, I don't think you understand it. I think it's actually one of the best deals in tech. It's certainly the best out of any of Apple's new product offerings right now. And I mean, I'm kind of not used to saying it, but it is a really good deal.

So this base M4 Mac mini costs $599, right? For that, you get the base computer with the M4 chip, which has quietly doubled to 16GB of unified memory instead of 8GB from before.

It has a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU. Now we're four generations into Apple Silicon, and the gains are actually starting to stack up compared to the M1. We already know it was a huge difference from the Intel chips, but I actually want to get a little more into that in the MacBook Pro review because I've been using an M1 Max MacBook Pro for three years since it came out.

And the M4 Max is the first one that's actually tempted me to upgrade between generations of Apple Silicon. It's really interesting. So, get subscribed and stay tuned for that video when it comes out. But the main thing you need to know is this base M4 chip is great—it's super solid and power-efficient at everyday normal activities like web browsing, music streaming, and multitasking like crazy.

And it can handle what I think I would call medium-grade activities very easily. Not heavy stuff like graphically intensive gaming or heavy video editing, but pretty much anything short of that. This could be a coding and developing machine. This could be a photo editing machine. Pixelmator runs like a dream.

And fun fact: Apple just bought Pixelmator, interestingly. But yeah, just having a ton of Arc tabs open, stuff like that—just running around, multitasking—it runs like a dream. It's great. It's as good as you'd expect the world's fastest single-core performer to do.

The Price Ladder

So yeah, the Mac mini has been, for four years, the most affordable Mac—the sort of entry point for anyone to get into macOS. But this year, with the doubling of the base memory, it just feels like a particularly good deal. Think of it this way: the M4 iMac that also just got refreshed is basically the exact same computer, but just in an upright desktop with a non-replaceable display. That starts at $1,299, so you can use that $700 difference to get whatever screen you want.

Now, you can obviously also upgrade from the base Mac mini, but I don't think you should, and I'll explain why. See, Apple is known for building what I've called a price ladder, and they're just trying to get you to climb as high as possible. They do this across all their products, but there's always a really tempting upgrade sitting right above the base model.

And then when you spend that money, you're kind of right underneath another tempting upgrade, and then they kind of walk you up, trying to get you to spend as much money as possible. It's really smart—they do it with iPhones, iPads, and everything else. This base Mac mini, I'm telling you, is a good deal, but it only has 256GB of storage.

Many people are fine with that and can live with it, that's great. But if you know you're going to be working with a lot of media, a lot of video, then you start looking at upgrades to the storage, and that's where you'll find that walking it up to a terabyte costs $400 more dollars.

Or, if you plan to do some wired networking, bumping it up to 10Gb ethernet costs $100 more dollars on top of that. For the price of just those upgrades, you could almost get another Mac mini. It's crazy. Like, basically, across the board, Apple's upgrade pricing is pretty crazy with this computer, which is why I'm specifically saying the base model is such a good deal.

And actually, if you're lucky enough to have a .edu email address right now, the student discount drops it down to $499, which is sick. But once you know you're going to be doing upgrades to the pre-purchase spec, which you have to know before buying it, 'cause you can't upgrade it after the fact—everything is built in—then it becomes more of a normal deal.

The Best Portable Workstation Mac

I do want to say this, though. So the third and final crazy thing about this Mac mini is that the maxed-out version has a case for the best portable workstation Mac. Now, this doesn't apply to everybody. This is coming from me, someone who used to drag an iMac Pro in a Pelican case through the airport to events because it was the fastest editing machine I could reasonably travel with, and it actually made sense for me. So, coming from that perspective.